Slowly Starting the New Year
with signs and celebrations
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Hello Hedge Mystic Tribe, welcome to 2025!
How will you live in the new year? What will you change? Are there things to discard, to embrace, to face?
Before you do any or all of those things, let’s create some spaciousness so you can slowly return to daily life after the busyness of the holiday season.
And the January Man
Comes round again in woolen clothes
And boots of leather
To take another turn and walk along
The icy road he knows so well.
Oh the January Man is here, for starting each
and every year
Along the road forever. ~ David Goulder
It’s easy for January to seem like a letdown after the glittering lights and merry celebrations of the holiday season (especially if your well-intentioned New Year’s resolutions have already gotten off track or failed to start at all, whether by accident or design.).
I’ve been deeply immersed in keeping the Twelver Days of Christmas this year, so the year's turning went quietly with little fanfare. Then Christmastide ended on Twelfth Night, and the new season of Ephinaytide on January 6th, with its sudden enlightenment and cosmic revelations, jolted me out of the holiday haze and jettisoned my whole being into a new year I hardly noticed had begun.
The current “calendar year” is constructed to manage business, commerce, banking, law, government, and civic life. It governs our shared societal day-to-day reality, much like the “academic calendar” governs time at the university.
He who Controls your Time, Rules over your Destiny
We rip off the last page of our calendar, and suddenly, we gain power over Time. In a nanosecond, we extinguish 2024, relegating it to the dustbin of history, and open a door onto an entirely new expanse of time we call 2025.
However, current calendar time is not the only measure of a year. The Celtic Wheel of the Year invites us to reckon the beginning of the year at Samhain, October 31st, as the darkness rolls in faster and faster until the sun’s rebirth at Winter Solstice. Beginning in the darkness aligns with many other cultures, past and present, who count the passage of time by lunar calendars, beginning holy days, sabbaths, months, and ordinary days with the onset of darkness rather than in the dawn of “a new day.”
The Anglo-Saxons and other northern cultures saw the year as having only two parts, dark and light, no doubt due in part to the extremes of light and dark the northern reaches of the globe experience. The light half of the year begins at the Winter Solstice when the days start to grow longer. It encompasses winter's withering away, spring's first stirrings, and summer's blossoming. The dark half begins at the Summer Solstice when daylight starts to wane. In this half of the year, summer slips away, ripens into harvest, and the onset of winter begins. For the Anglo-Saxons years were counted in winters.
In the agricultural societies of Europe, cunning farmers (and most were, as they knew the secrets of working with the spirits of the land to coax a bountiful crop and good pasture land for their flocks and herds) would have reckoned the start of their year at Imbolc/Candlemas when herds were moved from their winter quarters in barns to open pasture in the hills, and plowing could begin.
In each instance above, the how and when of marking the beginning of the year profoundly affects the rhythm and quality of your life.
When will you mark the beginning of your new year? You'll have to stick to the standard calendar for paying bills, banking, entering into contracts, working at your job, etc. But, in your personal, spiritual and inner life, you can choose how you reckon Time and thereby shape the contours of your days and your experience of life and destiny.
Personally, I like to take January slow, let the Christmas spirit linger, be open to Ephinany's revelations, and re-enter the winter season refreshed rather than depleted from too fast a transition from holiday to ordinary.
Our female ancestors had a unique way to mark the transition out of the holiday season and back to business as usual: St. Distaff Day, January 7th. Here’s a snippet about that from a previous Hedge Mystic essay…
A distaff is a tool used in spinning. It is designed to hold the un-spun fibers of flax or wool, keeping them untangled, and making spinning easier.
The distaff is a symbol of women’s work. The distaff itself has its own winter holiday in January.
If we peel back the layers and go deep, we find that women’s work is a metaphor for spinning and weaving. Far back in the mists of ancient memory, women’s work is a metaphor for the power to create, weave the web of life, spin the destinies of souls, utter profound prophecy, and activate the inner sight of divination.
These have always been the spiritual gifts, skills, and abilities associated with women that link them back to the memory of the forgotten goddess.
According to author and historian Max Dashu…
"the distaff symbolism… is not a theory but an irrefutable reality….The symbolism of the [distaff] emphasizes a connection between spinning, seiðr, (Norse female shamanic power), and causation.
It evokes a wider European pattern of distaff-bearing goddesses and threefold Fates or female ancestors.
It connects the shamanic ways of the völur (a seeress in Norse folklore) with the early medieval women’s sacraments…So the seiðstafr [aka distaff] of the völva belongs to a wide spectrum of female potency.”
Under the surface, as the subtext of women’s work, is the understanding, however suppressed, that the distaff is symbolic of women’s power.
We might even think of the distaff as the original magic wand.
Since St. Distaff Day has already passed, you may still need a special day to mark your re-entry into business as usual. Enter the January celebration, which our male ancestors would have marked Plough Monday (this year January 13th.) Since the division of labor today is not nearly as dualistic as in previous centuries, this will work fine if you need a way to mark the transition from the winter holidays into the second half of winter. Consider either of these days your permission slip to take January slowly.
Plough Monday was the first Monday after 6th January (Ephipany) and was the day on which things would return to normal after the Twelve Days of Christmas and people would return to work. It was also the first day of the new agricultural year and 16th century poet and farmer Thomas Tusser wrote:
Plough Monday, next after that Twelfth tide is past
Bids out with the plough, the worst husband is last.Ronald Hutton, in his book Stations of the Sun, writes of how there are records from the 15th century of ploughs being dragged around the streets "while money was collected behind it for parish funds" and that this money might be spent on the "upkeep" of plough lights, which were candles that were kept burning in church at this time to bring the Lord's blessing on those working in the fields. Steve Roud, in The English Year writes of how there was often a 'common' or 'town' plough that was loaned out to locals who could not afford to buy their own and that this would be kept at the parish church. Roud notes: "its presence presumably gave the opportunity for services based on blessing the plough and praying for success in the coming year". ~ The Tudor Society
Shape your destiny and the rhythm and quality of your life by how you count Time (along with some animal symbolism for January)
Are you ready to begin a new year? Has something significant in recent months empowered you to create a personal new year? Is your intention to hibernate until spring and start your new year then? I gravitate to this last option.
Bear is one of my power animals, and her wisdom tells me to hibernate and give birth to anything new while still in the winter cave, only letting it emerge in spring after it has grown a little and is able to sustain itself. This has been good advice over the years, and I continue to rely on this approach. Other animals associated with January are the dog and otter. Dogs are loyal, obedient, intelligent, and protective. Does that energy seem to be guiding you in 2025? Perhaps you’ve got a plan, and you need to be loyal to it because it will protect your energy, and it’s wise to consider your own energy needs in the future. Otters are outrageously playful and love snow. If they resonate in your energy field right now, embrace this month and enjoy yourself and whatever you plan to do.
There are also several birds associated with January. They are cuckoo, albatross, and phoenix.
Augury was a Greco-Roman religion practice of observing the behavior of birds, to receive omens. When the individual, known as the augur, read these signs, it was referred to as "taking the auspices". "Auspices" means "looking at birds". Auspex, another word for augur, can be translated to "one who looks at birds". ~Wikipedia
Cuckoos are associated with clocks, and if this one jumped out at you, you might feel like you're going crazy, repeating a pattern over and over, simply marking time and getting nowhere fast. This could signify that taking control of your time (and thus your destiny) should be a priority in 2025.
The albatross is in it for the long haul. Sometimes called a storm petrel, it has the inner and physical strength to go the distance. If 2025 is going to be a marathon for you, then the albatross may be your bird. This bird denotes freedom, endurance, and the ability to navigate life’s storms. It can also represent the psychological burdens associated with guilt or shame. If you are in a caregiving role or find yourself in one this year, bring the albatross into your awareness and look to her qualities to sustain you.
Finally, this year, the phoenix, the mythical firebird of transformation, death, and rebirth, could be our collective symbol. Look for a total collapse of institutions or ideas we assumed were permanent, going up in flames and coming to nothing but ash. As shocking and destabilizing as this may be, look for a brand new manifestation to appear before too long. While we may experience this collectively, it could also play out in individual lives.
Have you already hit the ground running in January? Are you slowly making your way into the new year? How will you control Time this year to craft a destiny that aligns with your purpose?
Did any of the animals or birds speak to you? Let me know in the comments.
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